Yo, today's QOD is Ideas Matter.

Here we go.

Welcome back to the Quote of the Day Show. I'm your host, Sean Crox and a Sean Crox

and.com. Today's episode is for the business owners out there. We've got Steve Balmer, who

is a former CEO of Microsoft and owner of the LA Clippers. He's going to share some wisdom

on how to have long-term success, not that short-term stuff, but long-term success in your business.

Here's Steve.

I joined Microsoft 34 years ago. At the time, the company was 30 people. We had done

two and a half million of good revenue the year before I started. I'd been, let me just say,

screwing around in school during the first five years of the company's history. When I joined

the company, it was already five years old. You could say two and a half million is a lot of money,

and it is. You could say 30 people is a lot of money, and it is. But compared to the 80 billion

or so of revenue that we do today and 100,000 people, I think it's probably fair to say I joined

a startup. I joined a startup. It's hard to talk about Microsoft like a startup now, but I think

I've got kind of a unique perspective. I've worked for a company of 30 people, 100,000 people,

and every size in between. I think I said, wow, that's pretty unique. We've done things well,

we've screwed things up, we've had a combination of all of the above, but it does give you a little

bit of lessons and perspective. People want to say, okay, what are we doing our startup? I say,

hey, I have a couple ideas. Some CEOs running some 40,000 person company. I have some ideas.

And certainly one of the things you learn as you go through this is none of the phases are the

same. I mean, the journey, the ride, the experience has been nothing short of amazing if nothing else

in terms of its volatility. I joined a company that existed before there was an IBM PC.

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